Six Hundred and Sixty-Six Words
by thaliaarche
Summary: Six 111-word drabbles about fire, falling, and those times Sebastian Michael Landers met Ciel in a park. (Content warnings: religious extremism, mental illness, abuse and homophobia).
1. Chapter 1

Two six-year-olds would meet in their neighborhood's park everyday and play "House." Ciel was always Father. Sebastian was always Mother.

Father did business at the sandbox— he claimed a six-year-old's dream job, declaring himself the head of a toy and candy company that doubled as a spy agency. At home, Mother cooked and cleaned, brushing tanbark dust off the play structure. Then Father came home, and Mother laid before him a massive and entirely imaginary feast, where every dish had a fancy French name neither could actually pronounce.

One time, Sebastian's parents saw Father kissing Mother goodbye before he left for the office.

Immediately, their fiery anger brought House crumbling down.


	2. Chapter 2

Claude is the high school running back, tall, muscled, yet lithe enough to elude opponents.

Falling into bed, Sebastian clutches his pillow and moans, admitting that man rouses sinful desires in him. Then Sebastian thinks of how Alois has been bullied into becoming a knife-wielding sadist, how Angelina moved away, how the Sutcliff boy— girl— took a razor and . . .

Sebastian can _feel_ God damning him.

He sleeps, tossing and turning, then shoots upright as Claude strides into his dreams, chest bare, chiseled, gorgeous.

Sebastian tries fantasizing about Lizzie instead. He feels nauseous.

By dawn, he's rocking, crying for a six-year-old boy who kissed him in a park.


	3. Chapter 3

Sebastian fights to distract himself, deny himself. Every morning, he wakes up at 6, runs six miles, and eats a banana for breakfast. Lunch is half a ham sandwich.

He stays late at track practice, though his legs falter, burning from overexertion. He drives home after dark, squinting through rain, slamming the gas, then the brakes. Coming in, he nods to his parents and grabs another banana, sprints upstairs and locks himself in his room with his books.

He writes papers. He solves limits. He codes, breaking problems into tiny steps, his computer cranking out answers at superhuman speed.

At midnight, he throws himself into sleep, hopefully too weary to dream.


	4. Chapter 4

Sebastian hurls himself into his routines, into the "perfect student" aesthetic. Yet the damned desires persist, now fused with exhaustion and hunger.

He cannot belong here, cannot survive here. So Sebastian starts dreaming of heights, of towering far above this town, of flying, of falling . . . Of snapping his neck.

(It's a clean, efficient method— well, not for those who wipe up the mess left behind, but that won't be his concern.)

Satanism breaks his fall— LaVeyan Satanism, its cool, atheistic rationality easily discovered through the internet. Religion rings in Sebastian's bones still, whispering he is possessed, yet he is certain his mind is his own.

Doubts re-emerge.


	5. Chapter 5

Each Sunday, Sebastian buttons down his white, long-sleeved shirt and dons pressed black slacks. He forces himself into the car; his father drives. They sit straight-backed and silent.

Sebastian seethes inside the church, as if the very place repels him. Perhaps faith is a positive force somewhere, but these hypocrites say "love" and mean "hate." Behind a stony expression, Sebastian critiques, deconstructs, demolishes their pious rhetoric. He daydreams about burning it all down and nearly bursts out laughing.

The mirth disappears once they command him to pray for his loved ones. He cannot laugh, yet, at the fact that prayer is a hollow lie.

Their unwitting dishonesty prickles on his skin.


	6. Chapter 6

Spurred on by foolish hope, Sebastian shows himself— rational, nihilistic, loving men— to his father.

"You've got the devil in you."

And if Sebastian still believed in afterlives at all, he'd swear Ash is the hellish one— his father growls, vicious as a Fury, whipping him with a black leather belt. "Why? Why?"

Sebastian smiles.

He's doubted for eternities, starting that night crazy Vincent sank himself in drink and took a torch to the house, since Sebastian himself prayed that Ciel might escape, somehow. Anyone could have answered— saints or angels or the Devil himself— yet Ciel is dead.

So, Sebastian laughs as the blows keep falling, God is dead too.


End file.
